CSES Blog

The 2021 GESIS Klingemann Prize for the Best CSES Scholarship was awarded to Enrique Hernández, Eva Anduiza, and Guillem Rico of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, for their article “Affective polarization and the salience of elections” in Electoral Studies. We are grateful that they have provided the following summary of their award-winning research. Rising anger and hatred in democratic politics have recently attracted considerable attention. Especially during elections campaigns, when loathing opposing parties has become commonplace. This has led to a growing concern about affective polarization, or the predisposition to view opposing parties negatively and co-partisans positively. These feelings of animosity towards opposing parties …

The 2019 GESIS Klingemann Prize for the Best CSES Scholarship was awarded to Ruth Dassonneville of the University of Montreal and Ian McAllister of the Australian National University for their article “Gender, Political Knowledge, and Descriptive Representation: The Impact of Long-Term Socialization” in the American Journal of Political Science.  The authors received their prize and presented their work during a reception at the 2019 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA) in Washington DC, United States. We are grateful that they have provided the following summary of their award-winning research. By Ruth Dassonneville and Ian McAllister Political knowledge …

      The 2019 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA) will take place in Washington DC during August 29 – September 1, 2019. To help in planning for those who will be in attendance, we have compiled two lists below. Please be sure to confirm times and locations in the APSA program in case of last-minute changes. The first list includes Saturday night’s CSES 25th Anniversary Roundtable and Reception (which includes a presentation of the 2019 GESIS Klingemann Prize for the Best CSES Scholarship). It also includes two special panels organized by the project, on Thursday …

The 2019 annual conference of the Midwest Political Science Association (MPSA) will take place in Chicago,  April 4-7, 2019. If you’re planning to attend, you may be interested in the sessions listed below, which make use of CSES data. If you are making a presentation that makes use of CSES data and it does not appear here, please let us know via email: cses@vanderbilt.edu. The conference will be held at the Palmer House Hilton. When you arrive at MPSA, please verify the below room locations in the final conference program, as they are subject to change. Friday, April 5, 2019 Panel: …

Elections Activate Partisanship Across Countries Shane P. Singh Judd R. Thornton It has long been argued that elections make underlying partisan predispositions more prominent. However, existing observational research on this topic is limited by the lack of an exogenous measure of election salience. To overcome this, in our recent article in the American Political Science Review, we leverage the fact that the dates on which Comparative Studies in Electoral Systems (CSES) respondents are interviewed within each post-election survey are likely unrelated to partisanship and its correlates, and we use the number of days between the day of the election and the date …

In the New CSES Country Spotlight series, collaborators from an election study including CSES for the first time discuss its electoral context and the significance of running CSES in the country. New CSES Country Spotlight: Costa Rica Ronald Alfaro-Redondo Costa Rica will join the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) collaborative program of research in the near future. Costa Rica is a singular case. We are talking about the oldest and most stable democracy in Latin America. Here, contests are free and fair, electoral rules and institutions are strong and truthful. The Electoral Supreme Court ranks in the top of …

The 2018 GESIS Klingemann Prize for the Best CSES Scholarship was awarded to André Blais of the Université de Montréal, Eric Guntermann of the Université de Montréal and University of California Berkeley, and Marc André Bodet of the Université Laval for their article “Linking Party Preferences and the Composition of Government: A New Standard for Evaluating the Performance of Electoral Democracy” that was published in Political Science Research and Methods in 2017. The authors received their prize and presented their work during a reception at the 2018 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA) in Boston, United States. We are grateful that they …

The 2018 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA) will take place in Boston, August 31 – September 3, 2018. If you’re planning to attend, you may be interested in one or more of the sessions listed below, which make use of CSES data. This year’s conference theme is: Democracy and Its Discontents. If you are making a presentation which makes use of CSES data and it does not appear here, please let us know via email to: cses@vanderbilt.edu. When you arrive at APSA, please verify the below room locations in the final conference program, as they are subject to change. …

Economic Inequality Drives Electoral Winners and Losers’ Satisfaction with Democracy Sung Min Han and Eric C.C. Chang Few would dispute that citizens’ support for democracy is crucial for democratic stability and consolidation, especially when populism and extremism threaten to undermine democratic ideals and values in these days. Without citizens’ strong endorsement, democracies can face legitimacy crises and may even experience democratic reversal or breakdown. What factors can influence citizens’ attitudes toward democracy, then? Anderson and his co-authors have significantly advanced our understanding of citizens’ attitudes when they identified electoral winner-loser status to be one of most important determinants for democratic …

Do Bad Economic Conditions Explain the Success of Radical Left Parties in Europe? Raul Gómez and Luis Ramiro While most of the literature on economic voting focuses on mainstream parties, and particularly on the incumbent party, little is known about how support for non-mainstream parties is affected by bad economic conditions. The literature on radical-right and Green parties is inconclusive, as unemployment has been found to have positive, negative or no significant effects depending on the study (Mudde 2007: 205-206; Müller-Rommel 1998). It has been often argued that these parties do not fare particularly well in contexts in which the …

The Bipolar Voter: On the Effects of Actual and Perceived Party Polarization on Voter Turnout in Multiparty Democracies Mert Moral Although it has long been argued that both diversity and distinctiveness of party policy offerings influence electoral behavior, few studies to date have investigated the effect of political polarization on voter turnout. While comparative research on the topic is limited to a handful of studies employing aggregate-level data, previous individual-level studies focus only on the two-party system in the US. On the one hand, some individual-level studies expect high party polarization to provide citizens with clearer cues about party positions …

How Does Partisanship Irrationalize the Decision to Vote in Western and Postcommunist Democracies? Dong-Joon Jung The rational choice model of voting assumes that people decide whether to vote as a consequence of the calculation of the benefits and costs associated with voting (Downs 1957; Riker and Ordeshook 1968). According to the model, only those who expect the benefits they will receive to exceed the costs they have to pay would turn out to vote. Often, however, the assumption of rationality betrays the reality; people still vote even though they are clearly aware that the benefits will not be greater than …

Postcard from the Field Modes of Data Collection in the 2017 Norwegian National Election Study Bernt Aardal and Johannes Bergh In our Postcards from the Field series CSES collaborators provide an update and commentary on election studies recently in the field. The first Norwegian National Election Study (NNES) was conducted by Stein Rokkan and Henry Valen in connection with the 1957 parliamentary election. There was no election study in the following 1961 election. The next time around in 1965, and in every Norwegian parliamentary election since then, election studies have been carried out. As a result, the NNES is one …

Directional and Proximity Models of Party Preferences in a Cross-national Context Bojan Todosijević Normative theory suggests that choosing an ideologically close political party is a sign of rational political behavior. Reality, however, sometimes differs from the norm, and voters chose ideologically distant parties. The results of an examination into the macro-level factors that affect the extent to which citizens base their party preferences on ideological proximity were presented at the 7th Annual Conference of the European Political Science Association (Milan, June 22 – 24, 2017). There are two main models that formalize the spatial connection between parties and citizens: the proximity …

Are you attending the 2017 general conference of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) in Oslo during September 6 – 9?  If so, you may be interested to attend one or more of the below presentations, panels and poster sessions which make use of CSES data. If you are making a presentation which makes use of CSES data and it does not appear here, please let us know via email to: cses@vanderbilt.edu THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 7, 2017 Panel: Measuring Rising Forms of Political Participation Thursday September 7, 11:00 am, Building BL27 Georg Sverdrups hus Room: GS 2531 Presentation:  Mapping Online …

Are you attending the 2017 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA) in San Francisco during August 31 – September 3?  If so, you may be interested to attend one or more of the below presentations, panels and poster sessions which make use of CSES data. This year’s conference theme is: The Quest for Legitimacy: Actors, Audiences and Aspirations If you are making a presentation which makes use of CSES data and it does not appear here, please let us know via email to: cses@vanderbilt.edu FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 1, 2017 Panel: Media Diversity and Media Freedom Friday September 1, …

The 2017 GESIS Klingemann Prize for the Best Scholarship using CSES data was awarded to Dani Marinova of the Autonomous University of Barcelona for her book “Coping with Complexity: How Voters Adapt to Unstable Parties” that was published by ECPR Press in 2016. The author received the prize and presented her work during a reception at the 7th Annual General Conference of the European Political Science Association (EPSA) in Milan, Italy. She kindly contributed the following synopsis of her work. Coping with Complexity: How Voters Adapt to Unstable Parties Dani Marinova Nearly five decades ago Carl Friedrich remarked: “Party development is more highly dynamic than any other …

Explaining the Trump Victory: Populist Sentiments and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election Deirdre Tinney and Stephen Quinlan As the world peers into the crystal ball era of Brexit and President Trump, it has become clear that we need to talk about populism. These days, parties and politicians articulating what are regarded as populist views are to be found in established democracies globally. A vexing question however is do so-called populist sentiments shape vote choice? The Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) has responded with Module 5, which examines ‘citizens’ attitudes towards political elites, majority rule and out-groups in representative democracy’ …

In the New CSES Country Spotlight series, collaborators from an election study including CSES for the first time discuss its electoral context and the significance of running CSES in the country. New CSES Country Spotlight: Argentina Noam Lupu, Virginia Oliveros and Luis Schiumerini Most of what we know about voting behavior is informed by the experience of advanced democracies. The electoral context in developing democracies, however, is significantly different. Civil society is often weak, poverty and inequality high, political parties ephemeral and attachments to them weak, corruption rampant, and clientelism widespread. We cannot hope to understand how politics in these …